The Role of Sentence Intonation in Determination of the Meanings of the Quranic Verses

The polysemy and lexical similarity of the linguistic structures may lead to ambiguity in the speech and latency. But since a language needs to be away from this deficiency so as to be functional and useful, it needs to be cleansed from such meaning latencies based on the available indications. One indication that can be categorized among the verbal indications is the sentence intonation. By changing and altering sentence intonation, a single sentence can provide different meanings, or its structure can be distinguished from other structures that have similar lexicon. This is because every sentence, according to the situation in which it is expressed, is uttered with a certain intonation and that intonation would distinguish it from the structures that look similar but has different meanings. Since the Holy Quran entails numerous cases where similar structures have different or multiple meanings, this study has first introduced the concept of sentence intonation and its functions in language, and then has tried to examine the necessity of noting sentence intonation role in formation or specification of the meanings of the Quranic verses.